The open house precedes the kickoff
of a five-year seed grant awarded to CIGRU by the West Virginia Higher
Education Policy Commission, under its Research Challenge Grant program, one of
three such awards to WVU. The WVU gas utilization team will include eight CIGRU
researchers, working in partnership with Marshall University, the WVU Energy
Institute, the WVU
Bureau for Business and Economic Research, the West Virginia Chemical
Alliance Zone, Morgantown’s National Energy Technology Laboratory and the
Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research and Innovation Center.

The five-year, $2.2 million effort,
includes $940,000 in WVU resources, rounding out CIGRU’s expanding research
program. CIGRU is also currently performing more than $3 million in research
funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition, the Rapid Advancement in
Process Intensification Deployment Manufacturing Institute of the American
Institute of Chemical Engineers recently funded a CIGRU-led team as one of its
inaugural public-private partnerships.

The Research Challenge Grant effort
will focus on advancing technologies currently being developed by WVU to
promote local, up-the-value chain, downstream utilization of natural gas in
West Virginia’s residential, commercial and industrial sectors, thus generating
economic development within the state. This is the next step in regionally
leveraging the industry-changing results in upstream production over the last
two decades.

“The RCG funding will help us
develop a cost-effective, modular catalytic natural gas-to-chemical process
utilizing microwave excitation at low temperatures and pressures,” said Hu, the
project’s principal investigator. “This will include both developing
technologies for the conversion of wellhead natural gas to chemicals and an
advanced combustion engine technology that targets transportation and distributed
power generation.”

“As West Virginia’s experience with
coal taught us, extraction is not enough,” said Joshua
Fershee, associate dean at WVU’s College of Law and co-investigator on the
project.“Our law and policy research
will work to maximize benefits and minimize potential harms from shale gas
development. We must coordinate our
efforts to develop the right legal and regulatory framework so that WVU’s
continuing advances in gas utilization science can help attract and retain the
sustainable downstream and up-the-value chain industries that will boost the economic
infrastructure vital to the future of West Virginia, while protecting the environment
and supporting the jobs our state desperately needs.”

“This RCG grant really is the
fruition of the state’s and WVU’s investment in assembling an interdisciplinary
team of world class gas utilization researchers within CIGRU,” said John Adams, an advisory committee
member on the project and assistant director for business operations at the WVU
Energy Institute. “WVU’s team brings an
integrated and innovative, interdisciplinary focus on technology development in
the broader context of critical regulatory, economic, and policy issues that
face the state and the region.”

WVU’s CIGRU works in partnership
with government and industry stakeholders to advance the state of the art in
shale gas upgrading technology through research. Its portfolio of activities
achieves this mission through cross-cutting research of emerging enabling
technologies, interdisciplinary training of scientists and engineers and
facilitation of technology transfer to the private and government sectors.